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LIGHT IN DARK PLACES 



A SPIRITUAL IMAGIXATIOX 



BY 
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NEWMAN SMYTH 



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NEW YORK 

THOMAS Y. CROWELL & CO. 

PUBLISHERS 



THE LIBRARY QF 
CONGRESS, 

Two Copies Received 

MAR 28 1903 

Copyright Entry 

CLASS Ow xXc No. 

COPY B. 






Copyright, 1903, 
By Thomas Y. Crowell & Company. 



LIGHT IN DARK PLACES. 



There is a reasonable and gracious use of 
imagination to be made in aid of faith. A 
happy spiritual imagination may be sent as a 
good gift of God to us to brighten some dark 
day. A friend once said to me — an artist with 
a quick eye for lights and colors : " I was sit- 
ting in a gloomy room on the north side of a 
hotel, alone, far from home, and somewhat for- 
lorn, when I noticed occasional flashings of sun- 
light through my window. Wondering how 
such beams could come in as if on purpose to 
brighten the room for me, I went to the window 
and looked up, and saw a flock of pigeons wheel- 
ing in the air, and occasionally reflecting from 
their wings into my window the sunshine in 
which they were circling. " Our spiritual imagina- 
tions may sometimes do for our hearts a similar 
service, catching on their wings and reflecting 



4 LIGHT IN DARK PLACES. 

beams of heavenly truth to brighten us as we 
sit and think. But if these imaginations are 
not to be mere fancies, if they are to prove 
really helpful and cheering, they will catch and 
reflect some universal truth, as those birds did 
the sunshine. 

In the use of imagination in the spiritual 
realms there is a simple principle which we may 
trust ; by it a genuine imagination is distin- 
guished from a mere fancy. A fancy is only the 
fleeting image of our own thought or desire 
thrown out upon the world, as a picture flashed 
upon a screen ; a genuine imagination will pro- 
ject beyond our knowledge some true line of 
life, which has been followed in part through our 
present experience up to the bounds of human 
knowledge. Very much as the dotted lines on 
a map may indicate where, through regions as 
yet untraversed, some way already begun may 
be carried further on into a country as yet unex- 
plored ; so our truest conceptions of our future 
life will be the imagined continuations of the ways 
of our present attainment, the completions of the 



LIGHT IN DARK PLACES. 5 

best and worthiest life already realized. We 
may look most happily into God's future for us 
and ours, along the familiar ways of our truest 
and dearest life and love. 

The poets who are our trusted guides into 
" the heavenlies " have learned this law of the 
spiritual imagination, for they see common 
experiences glorified. When Dante in his 
journey through the celestial spheres approached 
the last ascent towards Paradise, as the night 
came on, while 

u From the other side 
A voice that sang did guide us," 

he saw before him a way that rose upright with- 
in the rock, a narrow, precipitous path, lying 
darkly in the shadows of the crags on either 
side. But as he looked up that gloomy path, 
" close pent on either side by shelving rock," he 
saw the stars shining with new lustre in the 
space of sky just visible above the pass. 

u A little glimpse of sky was seen above ; 
Yet by that little I beheld the stars, 
In magnitude and lustre shining forth 
With more than wonted glory." 



6 LIGHT IN DARK PLACES. 

When our life becomes like a path up a steep 
pass, shut in by dark crags and filled with the 
mountain's gloom, then some old, familiar truths, 
shining with more than wonted glory in the 
little glimpse of sky above, may be the welcome 
stars to give us hope and cheer. Though the 
night comes on, the awful pass will lose its 
terrors because of their shining through it. 

A simple human trust in the best life of our 
hearts and homes, and its natural completion 
beyond, is the prophetic secret of the Spirit 
which, those poets have known whose singing 
has for us the sweetness and the power of the 
larger hope. Recall, as an instance of this pro- 
phetic interpretation of our present life, the 
passage in Whittier's " Snowbound " which be- 
gins with the words : 

" O Time and Change ! — with hair as gray 
As was my sire's that winter day, 
How strange it seems, with so much gone 
Of life and love, to still live on." 

The memory of sorrow ends, as with a burst of 
sunshine, in these lines: 



LIGHT IN DARK PLACES. 7 

u Alas for him who never sees 
The stars shine through his cypress-trees ! 
Who, hopeless, lays his dead away, 
Nor looks to see the breaking day 
Across the mournful marbles play ! 
Who hath not learned, in hours of faith, 

The truth to flesh and sense unknown, 
That Life is ever lord of Death, 

And Love can never lose its own." 

Imagination in this conclusion passes without 
break or violence from the seen to the unseen. 
Hope is but memory glorified. The last line is 
the natural continuation of the line just before 
it; the faith that "Life is ever lord of Death" 
has for its full completion the trust that " Love 
can never lose its own." Only now we may say 
still more ; the first truth of Life's lordship over 
Death is not wholly unknown to flesh and sense ; 
for our present knowledge of death, gained from 
scientific researches concerning its part and use 
in evolution, discloses to us the fact that it has 
always served Life, and has ministered to the 
enrichment, diversification, and advance of the 
kingdom of life ; so that we may say it is a 



8 LIGHT IN DARK PLACES. 

truth half-known at least to flesh and sense 
that Death is always the servant, and Life is 
lord of all. Our further trust in Love's com- 
pletion transcends, while it fulfills, this truth of 
life already revealed and realized. 

This right use of the spiritual imagination 
will help us interpret some of the more tragic 
events of life. It may throw some gleams of 
light into darkest places. For there are some 
very dark places, some utterly strange experi- 
ences, through which occasionally human life 
must pass, which seem to be left unillumined 
by the faiths which are sufficient for our reason- 
able assurance in the ordinary course of events. 
Some sudden shock, an untimely loss, a seeming 
waste, or an awful ending of a life will render 
faith itself speechless ; we can then only stand 
still with hearts benumbed, and say with bated 
breath, It was God's will ! Afterwards in quiet 
hours, when we may bear to think of such 
strange providences, we gain little light for 
their interpretation even from those truths which 
are sufficient usually to give us daily courage 



LIGHT IN DARK PLACES. V 

for daily life. Thoughts which have light in 
them for such experiences will come to us, if 
at all, from the far borders of our knowledge. 
Gleams may at times break upon our spirits, 
which we fail to keep in our thoughts as a clear 
light of reason; evanescent imaginations they 
may be of things unseen, but for the moment 
they will light up the face of life's hard inevit- 
ableness, and after they have come and gone 
we find left with us a more serene assurance of 
some Diviner presence in the darkest places. 

At times a familiar verse of the Bible may 
suddenly become luminous to us with a new 
meaning; a truth unseen before may shine forth 
from it with an immediate illumination, like a 
flashlight in a dark chamber; and that room 
will never afterwards seem to us so dark again. 
A single spiritual imagination, though it be 
evanescent, is happily to be prized, if it may 
serve to disillusion ever afterwards some dark 
passage of its fears. 

There are some Scriptures which, if brought 
together, may show some purpose in these most 



10 LIGHT IN BARK PLACES. 

baffling and bewildering perplexities of faith; 
they may help us wait more quietly and trust- 
fully for the full interpretation of the often 
strange shattering of human hopes and the fre- 
quent brokenness and sad incompleteness of our 
present life. 

They are such Scriptures as these concerning 
the ministry of angels and saints and the con- 
tinued ministry of the Son of man : 

Are they not all ministering spirits, sent forth to do ser- 
vice for the sake of them that shall inherit salvation? — Ileb. 
1 : 14. 

And no man could learn the song save the hundred and 
forty and four thousand, even they that had been purchased 
out of the earth. These are they which follow the Lamb 
whithersoever he goeth. These were purchased from among 
men, to be the firstfruits unto God and unto the Lamb. — 
Rev. 14 : 3-4. 

I am a fellow-servant with thee and with thy brethren 
that hold the testimony of Jesus. — Rev. 19 : 10. 

For in that he himself hath suffered being tempted, lie is 
able to succor them that are tempted. — Ileb. 2 : 18. 

Beloved, think it not strange concerning the fiery trial 
among you, which cometh upon you to prove you, as though 
a strange thing happened unto you : but inasmuch as ye are 



LIGHT IN DARK PLACES, 11 

partakers of Christ's sufferings, rejoice; that at the revela- 
tion of his glory also ye may rejoice with exceeding joy. 
1 Peter, 4 : 12-13. 

Such Scriptures disclose the truth, which has 
become familiar to our Christian hope, that the 
future life is one of varied activities, where all 
may be ministering spirits. Perfect action, 
action without sense of fatigue because it is 
perfect, may be part and element of the rest of 
Heaven. But besides this general conception of 
all the saints and angels as ministering spirits, 
these Scriptures partly disclose another truth, 
which, if we let it light up our thoughts, partic- 
ularly of some darker providences, may bring to 
us some special comfort and cheer. Through 
many Scriptures like these, there runs a strong, 
sure principle of true life, which, without break 
or violence, we may naturally imagine to be 
carried on into the world to come. It is the 
truth that life is all for service. Every life may 
have its own appointed service. This involves 
also the truth that each life may have its special 
training for its own service here and hereafter. 



12 LIGHT IN DARK PLACES. 

The help and mighty comfort of this truth may 
come to us as we imagine this law of service to 
be continued beyond this present world, and 
conceive of our life now as a training and sea- 
soning for our individual ministries hereafter. 
Experiences otherwise hard to be understood, 
some strange events, and sorrows also most in- 
explicably sad, as well as the times and circum- 
stances of some deaths, may have a gleam at 
least of God's blessed light thrown upon them, 
if we may conceive them to belong to His 
special training of some spirits for their special 
service among all the ministering spirits who 
shall follow the Lamb whithersoever he goeth. 
This truth of God's choice and training of souls 
here for rare service hereafter has in it many 
luminous suggestions ; largely imagined, it may 
surround, as with an atmosphere of light, some 
mysterious providences, which at times rise be- 
fore us in their hard inevitableness, awful in 
their gloom. 

This truth may have light in it for many in 
their sorrow for early or untimely death. How 



LIGUT IN DARK PLACES. 13 

often it happens that some dear child, perhaps 
the sweetest and most beautiful of children, is 
taken from the home because the Gardener needs 
that flower. In the " Life " of James Mar- 
tineau we read of the great sorrow of his early 
married life, when a boy of rare promise, the 
light and beauty of his household, passed away. 
In the pathos of such unfinished life we say, 
How can God so will it ! We must too often 
wonder why one so young and fair should die. 
But think of each life here as a beginning of 
some immortal ministry; think of each soul as 
fitted in its season here for its own personal minis- 
try hereafter. For this is a thought from which 
a gleam of comfort may descend into our hearts 
when so bereft ; it is thought of the fair service 
there may be for childhood throughout the 
immortal years ; the service that may remain 
always for the children of the earth in the king- 
dom of heaven. They were suffered to live here 
just days enough of child-life to fit them for the 
special grace and happy ministry of childhood in 
the Father's house. Thev who have not lived 



14 LIGHT IN DARK PLACES. 

on through the lengthening years to lose the 
merry note of life's early innocence ; they who 
lived just long enough to be glad ; they whose 
voices have filled our homes with a gladsomeness 
all their own, — for what perpetual service may 
they be chosen and fitted, because God took 
them when they had just learned that bright 
note of childhood, and its joyous help for us, 
and made that in all the coming ages their 
special grace, their sweet, glad gift to all the 
angels. Too soon, we sometimes think, we lose 
that note and joyousness from our human homes. 
We wish that we could keep it, and that our 
children would not grow up so quickly. Per- 
haps God does keep it always in His eternal 
home and for the happiness of all the saints. 
They, indeed, shall grow in grace and heavenly 
wisdom, — these little ones from our own homes. 
Theirs shall be in the coming ages the wisdom 
of the angels of the Most High ; but in all their 
future knowledge, their coming power and grace, 
the beauty of their youth shall remain upon 
them, and ever fresh in their hearts shall be the 



LIGHT IN DARK PLACES. 15 

gladness of a life on earth that was just long 
enough to have known how bright and full of 
laughter, sunshine, and glee a pure sweet child 
from God may be. 

There is another strange providence, seem- 
ingly utterly unnatural, down into the mystery 
of which this thought of life here for service 
hereafter may throw an interpretative light. It 
is the strangeness of the waste of human power 
and the failure of possible careers of great use- 
fulness, when men and women are ordered by 
some sudden providence from their posts of ser- 
vice here, while they are in their prime. We 
needed them. Their loss is one of the hardest 
things for us to understand. A man is just 
ready to do a man's work in the world, which 
has so great need of manly work, — and he is 
cut down in his strength. A woman has begun 
to fill some happy sphere with the radiance of 
her pure spirit, and she is gone from us. It 
seems as though some statue had been finished 
to fit perfectly its appointed niche, and the 
Sculptor who made it breaks it. This is an old 



16 LIGHT IN DARK PLACES. 

mystery of the unfinished life ; it is an ever new 
sorrow. We saw it but yesterday in an empty 
home ; and it is old also as the sculptured sep- 
ulchres of the ancients. One may see it — and 
the tears will come to the eyes as one looks 
upon the representation of it — in those cold 
marbles of the Greeks, on one of which, four 
hundred years before Christ, a sculptor had 
carved for a sepulchre the form of a young 
mother who had just given her new-born child 
to the nurse who bends weeping over her. It is 
also a memory fresh as the sorrow for the youth 
of rare promise in Tennyson's " In Memoriam." 
In view of this seeming waste of Divine re- 
sources in the lives of men and women too soon 
cut short, this same luminous principle of life as 
a training for immortal ministry may not fail 
us ; here likewise we may imagine the possibili- 
ties of the service for which they have been called 
and chosen, and of the activities for which they 
were ready when they were sent on through 
death for their appointed service. Some choice 
work, for which they among all God's servants 



L1GIIT IN DARK PLACES. 17 

are peculiarly qualified ; some task which they 
of all others may make their own, may be wait- 
ing for those who shall have lived long enough 
to become strong and noble, who have inherited 
the full promise of their manhood or woman- 
hood ; — and then, in such command of their 
forces of. mind and heart as they have gained 
here, and with their powers in their fresh unex- 
hausted fulness, they have been quickly sum- 
moned hence to larger fields of service. If there 
be angels beholding the face of the Father in 
heaven, whose special task it be to guard little 
children here, among such happy ministering 
spirits may not she be best fitted for such service 
who has known on earth the first raptures of a 
mother's love ? And if God from all His wide 
domain would select from the hosts who fulfill 
His high behests some angels, like those whom 
St. John saw in his vision, to do His service, — 
who among them all might be more ready and 
eager to volunteer for such great action than 
they who had lived just long enough on earth to 
gain will and power, and aspiration for heroic 



18 LIGHT IN BARK PLACES. 

tasks ? The special ministry of those who have 
entered in their manly strength and grace the 
world to come may be more than others as the 
ministry of the " strong angel" of the book of 
Revelation, holding, not a harp or lyre, but the 
trumpet, giving forth no uncertain sound. 

We must stand at times before another expe- 
rience which is the darkest of all, and the hardest 
for us to explain, for it appears to be a contradic- 
tion of all God's known methods of good will in 
a human life. It is that depth of mental darkness 
in which even a strong intellect will sometimes 
be lost, while at the end an awful death may lie 
in wait. There have been some reasonable souls, 
keeping for years their integrity, who at last 
were led through mental alienation to their end. 
A true, forceful man or woman, living a devoted 
life, known in many works of good will among 
men, clear in religious convictions, firm in char- 
acter, unselfish in service, is overtaken by some 
seemingly preternatural darkness, and possibly 
called by God, who, we believe, will not forsake 
His servants, to enter alone an experience of 



LIGHT IN DARK PLACES. 19 

mental gloom and abandonment, the darkness of 
which no science of ours can explore, and where 
we, looking silently on, must gaze with reverent 
eyes, for it is a mystery of God. 

What can we say before this strange act of the 
God whom we trust? Can we say more than 
Job said : " Though he slay me, yet will I wait 
for him " ? Perhaps while we are waiting for 
Him, a gleam may fall over the face even of this 
hard mystery from these same Scriptures con- 
cerning the ministry of the angels and the saints. 
Here likewise we may find some needed aid for 
faith if we lay firm hold once more upon the sure 
principle that life and death may be one con- 
tinued training for some more excellent ministry 
hereafter. Here too a sober and reverent spirit- 
ual imagination may follow this law of life's 
perfecting far on beyond what is seen, and con- 
ceive of all God's dealings with a soul as one 
good purpose and preparation for its future ac- 
tivity, possibly for some rare use and blessing in 
the ages to come. 

This conception may gain clearer reality in 



20 LIGHT IN DARK PLACES. 

our thoughts, if we recall one instance in which 
through a temporary season of mental alienation 
and despair a soul was qualified for better ser- 
vice afterwards. We may then extend into 
futurity, and its possibilities of ministry, the 
truth which we may thus discover in God's 
method with a man during this present life. 

We remember how the poet Cowper was left 
seemingly forsaken in an almost maniacal de- 
spair. When asked to prepare some hymns for 
the Olney collection he answered, " How can 
you ask of me such a service ? I seem to myself 
to be banished to a remoteness from God's 
presence, in comparison with which the distance 
from East to West is vicinity, is cohesion." But 
in all our churches we are singing his hymns of 
gracious power and comfort : 

" There is a fountain filled with blood, 
Drawn from Immanuel's veins." 

" Sometimes a light surprises 

The Christian while he sings." 

lw God moves in a mysterious way, 
His wonders to perform." 



LIGHT IN DARK PLACES. 21 

Thousands of lost and hopeless souls have 
gained from Cowper, as from no other voice, the 
grace and peace of God. Did not his peculiar 
trial, the darkness of " the madness-cloud," 
belong, together with his " quick poetic senses," 
to the Divine method of his training that he 
might write our hymns of hope ? Were not the 
depths of his abandonment a momentary part 
and portion, not too long continued, of the way 
in which God led him that He might set a 
chosen poet on the heights to sing of His light 
and mercy? Looking through that way in 
which Cowper had been led, but not forsaken, 
Mrs. Bro waning may know 

M That earth's worst frenzies, marring hope, should mar not 
hope's fruition, 
And I, on Cowper's grave, should see his rapture in a 
vision ! " 

If, then, within the confines of this present 
life we may learn so much as this of the Divine 
way of perfecting some soul for singular use ; if 
we may observe how through its passing into 
clouds which erelong were scattered, a spirit 



22 LIGHT IN BARK PLACES. 

like Cowper's was rendered more sensitive to 
the glad light — how much more may it prove 
true hereafter that through peculiar trial, suffer- 
ing, and seeming abandonment even in the 
ending of some lives, God may have finished 
His work of making some chosen souls perfect 
for such ministry as they only can render to the 
wandering, the outcast, the despairing, in all the 
universe where there may be the lost to be 
found, and where ministering spirits, who them- 
selves have so suffered and have been so per- 
fected, are sent to do service for the sake of 
them that shall inherit salvation? 

This thought is more than the comfortable 
relief which we may win from the reflection 
that to some who have passed through a troubled 
night there may come a glad awakening. They 
may awake to life eternal, as one who has had a 
feverish dream may awaken from his confused 
and fearful slumber, and the morning light will 
shine more brightly for him, and the singing of 
the birds will be sweet, and the great joy of the 
day shall be a new rapture because the night is 



LIGHT IN UARK PLACES. 23 

past and the dream is gone. So, we often think, 
may be the awakening of some troubled souls 
into God's blessed light, filled, like the morning's 
sunshine, with all melodious voices. But the 
truth which our wrestling with these Scriptures 
may win for our hope is more than this, more 
than the joy of the awakening, — it is the en- 
nobling and glorifying truth of the continued 
ministry of a soul, called and chosen and well 
seasoned for its immortal service, its own and 
not another's, by its whole course and training 
in the tasks and trials of this life ; by unselfish 
toil, by singular devotion, by constant love for 
others less fortunate, and also, it well may be, 
by some strange affliction or lonely passage 
through darkest places of life and death, pre- 
pared and perfected for its special and personal 
ministry in glory — even as He was made per- 
fect through suffering, who was in all points 
tempted as we are, and who has obtained a 
ministry the more excellent. 

This same hope of life for service may serve 
to light up many other experiences ; each age, 



2i LIGHT IN DARK PLACES. 

and life ending at any season, may have its own 
call to ministry among the diversities of gifts in 
the kingdom of heaven. Everything in a human 
life may thus become in our eyes something 
sacred, useful, and gracious, as it is seen to 
belong to the Divine preparation and consecra- 
tion of souls for their fitting place and part 
among all His ministering spirits. 

One of the Scriptures, which we brought 
together, and which seem to light up one 
another, suggests quite directly this peculiar 
privilege of our earthly preparation for immor- 
tality. St. John heard a hundred and forty and 
four thousand singing before God's throne ; and 
they sing a new song ; and no man could learn 
their song. The reason why no others could 
learn their song is not far to seek. They had 
been purchased from the earth ; their song had 
been learned from their earthly life ; earth's 
sorrow becomes Heaven's song. It could have 
been learned in no other way. Their melody 
was their own. Other angelic spirits, pausing 
in their ministering flight to hear them sing, 



LIGHT IN DARK PLACES. 25 

might say to one another, " These are the earth- 
born, who have learned their own sweet note 
from their life in the world of the Cross ; none 
of us can sing their song, as they follow the 
Lamb whithersoever He goeth." Thus in the 
harmony of the praises and hallelujahs of the 
saints, which shall be as the voice of many 
waters, each soul, saved, purified, glorified, 
shall have its part, every life find its own voice, 
and heaven be richer for the earth that was. 

We have not touched as yet upon one other 
aspect of this truth, which lies nearer to us, and 
on which our last thought may rest. There 
may be for us now a lesson to be learned of 
immortal fellowship from the sudden shocks, 
the special sorrows, the incomprehensible prov- 
idences, which may enter our circles, or over- 
take our friends. These may be part, likewise, 
of our human training in the sympathies and the 
services of an immortal fellowship. 

There is one word, which next to those words 
that denote the closest ties of the flesh and our 
dearest relationships, has a power and worth and 



26 LIGHT IN BARK PLACES. 

glory in it beyond others in our English tongue, 
— it is the word " comrade." Perhaps only the 
soldier can have learned the full meaning and 
nobleness of that word " comrade." Men who 
have stood shoulder to shoulder through the 
battle's long, dark day ; men who have not only 
leapt forward together in the brave charge 
through the flame of death, but who have re- 
turned and ventured their lives again to save 
some fellow-soldier who has fallen at the front ; 
men who in the evening, after the rattle of the 
musketry has ceased, have gathered, the few of 
them who live, in their broken, rallied com- 
panies, to look again into one another's faces ; 
men who are readj^ to stand together another 
day of fierce battle, and perhaps of victory, — 
they can know, as no others may, what that 
word " comrade " means. 

Our life here may make us comrades for im- 
mortality. We may be winning amid these 
earthly scenes, and especially from our fiery 
trials, a comradeship for the life beyond. Chris- 
tians are now comrades in the hope of the ever- 
lasting life. 



MAR 28 1903 



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